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lore
Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize
Drawn from the rich folk traditions of his native Mammoth Cave region in Kentucky as well as the folklore of his adopted Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, the poems in Davis McCombs’s third collection exist along the fraught lines where nature and agriculture collide or in those charged moments where modernity intrudes on an archaic world. These poems celebrate out-of-the-way places, the lore of plants, wild animals and their unknowable lives, and nearly forgotten ways of being and talking and doing. Rendered in a language of great lexical juxtapositions, here are days of soil and labor, nights lit only by firelight, and the beings, possibly not of this world, lured like moths to its flames. McCombs, always a poet of place and of rootedness, writes poems teetering between two locales, one familiar but achingly distant, one bewildering but alluringly present.
Drawn from the rich folk traditions of his native Mammoth Cave region in Kentucky as well as the folklore of his adopted Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, the poems in Davis McCombs’s third collection exist along the fraught lines where nature and agriculture collide or in those charged moments where modernity intrudes on an archaic world. These poems celebrate out-of-the-way places, the lore of plants, wild animals and their unknowable lives, and nearly forgotten ways of being and talking and doing. Rendered in a language of great lexical juxtapositions, here are days of soil and labor, nights lit only by firelight, and the beings, possibly not of this world, lured like moths to its flames. McCombs, always a poet of place and of rootedness, writes poems teetering between two locales, one familiar but achingly distant, one bewildering but alluringly present.
- GenresPoetry
66 pages, Paperback
Published April 28, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 14, 2016
I appreciated the collection in its entirety, though on the whole preferred the poems in the section "Tradition Bearer" to those in "lore." Among my favorites: the haunting "Trash Fish; or, Nights Back Home," which riffs on a line from Robert Louis Stevenson to name "the places that demanded, but did not get, a murder"; the tension between stillness and transformation in "Playing the Beer Can"; and the strange handmade beauty left behind by a land's former inhabitant in "Old Stith."
And near to my heart is the precarious learning of place in "It Took Some Doin'," which as McCombs writes, "is a way of saying that a task, once finished, was full / of unexpected toil, that, midway through, it forced you / into doing things you didn't know you could or made / you redefine the terms or improvise."
And near to my heart is the precarious learning of place in "It Took Some Doin'," which as McCombs writes, "is a way of saying that a task, once finished, was full / of unexpected toil, that, midway through, it forced you / into doing things you didn't know you could or made / you redefine the terms or improvise."
June 4, 2018
This is one of the best books of poetry I've read in a long time. Rich and detailed and surprising. A poetry of a distinct American landscape and culture.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews